2008-09-26

Somewhere along the way I "grew up". I gave up playing music infavour of pursuing a career (in technology) that would support afamily. Not that music couldn't have done that it's just that I neverfigured out how... that and the realization that I probably justwasn't that good.

Fast forward many years and I got my first Mac computer. I had thething for over a year when one Sunday afternoon I decided to fire up aprogram that's been included with Macs for a number of years now.

Within a couple of hours I was hooked. I had created my first trackin decades. And what a revelation. All this time, on my little 12"Powerbook, I had a multitrack recorder, synths, drum machines and asample/loop library.

Holy crap! back in the Two Infant Children days, we had an 8-trackreel-to-reel rig, a drum machine, our instruments and whatever wecould think to rent... It could take a week to finish a song...Mobility, forget it. Editing. Not so much. Uphill both ways. (Andwe loved it!)

Anyway, the track I made that afternoon was made up of stock Appledrum loop slowed down a ton to 74bpm. I then played around with somesynth presets settling on Circuit Dialog and Samoa Sweep. Recordedthat. Then I started looking for other loops to see what stuck. Theywere Disco Pickbass 01 & 02, Funky Electric Guitar 03, OrchestraStrings 03 and Nordic Keyed Fiddle 02.

The track isn't that great but it sure beat spending the afternoongetting a high score in a video game and it marks the start of thecurrent leg of my journey.

Of course so excited by my creation was I and so eager to foist it onto an unsuspecting public that I didn't bother coming up with a decent title. Instead, I called it 'you decide' and you can hear it here:

It's a little fuzzy... all those years ago... I would've been 17. Iremember going to a party. Hooking up with a girl, Peggy; she had avoice; we went with a friend of mine, Mo to his friend Ralph's houseafter some kind of sleep deprivation... Ralph was (and still is) aguitar player and had a four track (yeah, one of those cassette jobs)so we recorded, we jammed (I played flute, she sang).

Peggy disappeared as suddenly as she appeared but wanting to be moreinvolved, somehow I volunteered to learn how to play bass...

Soon after we were all at a cottage (belonging to Ralph's parents)outside the city making noise, perhaps music. One of the biggerdecisions we faced was what to call ourselves. Mo and Ralph went foran evening walk, exploring while I did whatever. On their walk theyfound a small graveyard, very old. There they found two unnamedgraves. One marked, "Mother" and the other, "Two Infant Children".

They rushed back to the cottage to tell me the story. Such aridiculous rock-n-roll cliche, we had to go with it.